Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England - Георг Брандес - Страница 5

One of the first and chief things observable in this English literary group, is that it has certain characteristics in common with the whole European intellectual tendency of the period. These characteristics are universal because of the universal existence of their cause. Napoleon was threatening Europe with a world-wide Empire. To escape annihilation, all the threatened nationalities either instinctively or deliberately re-invigorated themselves from the sources of their national life. The national spirit is awakened and spreads and grows in Germany during the War of Liberation; in Russia it bursts into flames along with the ancient capital of the country; in England it inspires enthusiasm for Wellington and Nelson, and vindicates in bloody battles, from the Nile to Waterloo, the ancient English claim to the sovereignty of the sea; in Denmark the cannonade of the battle of Copenhagen awakens a new national spirit and produces a new literature. It is this patriotic spirit which leads all the different nations to the eager study of their own history and their own customs, their own legends and folk-lore. The devotion to everything national incites to the study and the literary representation of the "people"—that is to say, the lower classes of society, with whom the literature of the eighteenth century had not concerned itself. The reaction against French as a universal language brings even dialect into high repute.

In Germany, as we have already seen, patriotism led to enthusiasm for the country's past, for the Middle Ages—their faith, their superstitions, and their social order. In Italy we have, in Manzoni's religious verse, an apparent return to Catholicism. The faith which had petrified into dogma, and meant renunciation of the flesh, is upheld as synonymous with poetry and morality; it is transformed from a religion into an art motif. Manzoni's religious enthusiasm is the same enthusiasm as that which accompanied the Pope back to Rome and inspired Alexander with the idea of the Holy Alliance. Even France, the country which had produced Napoleon, was driven by the spirit of the age into a path leading in much the same direction as that taken by Germany; the new French literary movement was directed against the Academy, against the so-called classical, i.e., universal, cosmopolitan literature; the age of Louis XIV. was neglected, and the poets of the sixteenth century, Du Bellay, Ronsard, nay, even the poor grotesque poets whom Boileau had scoffed at and rejected, came into vogue again. (Victor Hugo's attack on the literary opinions of the period previous to his own; Sainte-Beuve's earliest literary criticism; Théophile Gautier's Les Grotesques.) In Denmark at the beginning of the century it was mainly in the wake of the German current that men's minds moved. They assumed an antagonistic attitude to French culture. But in the second and equally important stage of the literary movement, the antagonism becomes an antagonism to everything foreign, and more especially to Germany, which had for so long played the part of the oppressor in Denmark.[1]

In England we find the same essential features which distinguish the movement in all the other countries. The influence of France, which in the eighteenth century had been paramount in the upper classes of society, was shaken off. Pope, the last poet of the classical school, did not long remain a master in the eyes of the younger generation. They began to pluck at the little man's elaborate wig and trample over the trim beds of his garden. And now it became apparent what a powerful intellectual reserve force the British nation possessed in those countries which lay remote from the centre of political life, fresh, unexhausted by civilisation. Ireland, which in the eighteenth century had produced such a thinker as Swift and such a writer as Goldsmith, owned a treasury of lovely melodies which, as soon as a great lyric poet lent them words, were poured forth by all the singing throats of Europe. The Welsh collected and published their old songs and poems. And in Scotland, to which country the mean, depressing conditions prevailing among the English industrial classes had not as yet spread, but where a people, proud of its past and its land, preserved its national songs, its superstitions, and its political peculiarities, there appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century, as a protest against cold reason and artificiality in poetry, Macpherson's Ossian. The influence of Ossian was alike great upon Alfieri and Foscolo in Italy, upon Herder and Goethe in Germany, and upon Chateaubriand in France. On it follow in England Percy's collection of old English, and in Scotland Walter Scott's collection of Scotch, ballads.

But in the interval between these two publications our attention is demanded by one of those literary currents flowing from one country to another and back again, which it is our chief aim to trace, and which in this case is remarkably plain. Not long after Percy's Reliques appeared, a luckless young German lawyer in Government employ, Bürger by name, was appointed to a small post in Göttingen, where he lived in straitened circumstances and in unhappy and demoralising marital relations with two sisters. Into this man's house Percy's book finds its way. It makes a powerful impression on him, and fires him with the desire to write something which had long been proscribed by the rules of poetical art, but which he himself calls (to Baggesen, see The Labyrinth) poetry proper, namely, a ballad. He begins the famous Lenore and works at it slowly, week after week, with such a conviction of the importance of the step he is taking that his letters to his friends are full of nothing else. The ballad appears, and is soon read in every country in Europe. In the year 1795 an Edinburgh young lady introduces it to the notice of another lawyer in Crown employ; and this young man, Walter Scott by name, who was also to be an author, and a very much greater one, makes his literary début with a translation of Lenore and another ballad of Bürger's, The Wild Huntsman. His translations meeting with a favourable reception, Scott began to regard himself as a poet. And it was upon the basis of these translations and that of Götz von Berlichingen, which he published in 1799, that the national Scottish Romanticism of his poetry was founded.

There is, then, originally in this literature a distinct trace of the general European reaction against the eighteenth century. The strong national feeling which superseded the feeling of cosmopolitanism is to be found in England in Wordsworth in the form of patriotic poetical description, in Southey in the form of eulogy (at times partly, at times purely, official) of the Royal Family and the national exploits, in the Scottish-born Campbell in the form of passionately British songs of liberty and war; whilst Scott and Moore are positive literary personifications of Scotland and Ireland. The universal return to the popular has its chief representative and spokesman in Wordsworth, whose special theme is the life of the lower and lowest classes. The predilection for the Middle Ages is strongest in Scott, who combines the antiquarian's delight in memories and survivals of the past with the Tory politician's desire to represent the traditional in the most attractive light. The Romanticism of superstition finds its poet in Coleridge, whose studied childishness and simplicity are near of kin to Tieck's; and it is Coleridge, too, who, thoroughly imbued with the doctrines of the German philosophy of the day, enters a general scientific protest against those of the age of enlightenment. His philosophy is quite un-English; it is, in contradiction to the experimental nature of English science, purely transcendental; it is conservative, pious, and historical, because the philosophy preceding it had been radical, infidel, and metaphysical; it is a "Schellingism," which at first endeavours to preserve as many of the philosophic conclusions of the preceding century as possible, but which, ever more obstinate and ever more narrow-minded, hastens towards the opposite extreme from that which had proved fatal to the preceding period. The confusedly fantastic side of Romanticism is represented by Southey with his Oriental narrative poems; and as for the passionate, despairing heroes of Chateaubriand and Romanticism generally, we find them, more passionate and more manly, in the works of Byron; whilst Shelley's spiritualism and dissolution of all solid form into ethereal music recalls the ardour and vagueness of Novalis.

[1] This "oppression" was what today would be called "cultural imperialism". It should be remembered that the Danish kings were also German dukes (of Schleswig and Holstein) and very properly patronised German artists. In Denmark proper there was after 1800 a reaction against the German influence. Also Brandes is bitter because of the German annexation of the Danish part of Schleswig in 1864, but that happened half a century later and Denmark was not exactly an innocent victim.—Transcriber's note.